IMPROVING THE NORTH AMERICAN MULTI-MODEL ENSEMBLE (NMME) PRECIPITATION FORECASTS AT SEASONAL SCALE OVER THE HIMALAYAN REGION USING MACHINE LEARNING

Abstract

The coarse horizontal resolution global climate models (GCMs) have limitations in producing large biases over the mountainous region. Also, single model output or simple multi-model ensemble (SMME) outputs are associated with large biases. While predicting the rainfall extreme events, this study attempts to use an alternative modeling approach by using five different machine learning (ML) algorithms to improve the skill of North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME) GCMs during Indian summer monsoon rainfall from 1982 to 2009 by reducing the model biases. Random forest (RF), AdaBoost (Ada), gradient (Grad) boosting, bagging (Bag) and extra (Extra) trees regression models are used and the results from each models are compared against the observations. In simple MME (SMME), a wet bias of 20[Formula: see text]mm/day and an RMSE up to 15[Formula: see text]mm/day are found over the Himalayan region. However, all the ML models can bring down the mean bias up to [Formula: see text][Formula: see text]mm/day and RMSE up to 2[Formula: see text]mm/day. The interannual variability in ML outputs is closer to observation than the SMME. Also, a high correlation from 0.5 to 0.8 is found between in all ML models and then in SMME. Moreover, representation of RF and Grad is found to be best out of all five ML models that represent a high correlation over the Himalayan region. In conclusion, by taking full advantage of different models, the proposed ML-based multi-model ensemble method is shown to be accurate and effective.